February 19, 2026
Tools or just talk?
Gemini 3.1
Gemini 3.1: Google’s ‘smartest’ AI drops — can it actually do stuff
TLDR: Google launched Gemini 3.1 Pro, its most advanced AI that reads text, images, audio, video and huge files. Commenters cheer the long memory but roast its shaky tool use, sparking debate over real-world “agents” and corporate vibes—why this matters: power is nothing if it can’t actually act.
Google dropped Gemini 3.1 Pro, calling it their most advanced model for tough, real‑world tasks. It understands text, pictures, sound, video—even whole code projects—and boasts a gigantic “memory” of up to 1 million tokens, plus benchmark wins on DeepMind’s evals page. But the crowd didn’t swoon over numbers; they zoomed straight to the agent question: can it use tools, plan, and actually do things? “still terrible at tool calls,” snapped shmoogy, while chermi warned, “They gotta get on that. The agent trend seems real… they can’t afford to fall behind.”
Then the thread swerved into workplace drama. spwa4 unleashed a cynical rant about layoffs and “make yourself indispensable by sabotaging,” turning the launch into a wider corporate mood roast. Meanwhile, art‑minded folks kept it playful: simonw noticed a “more 3D” vibe compared to a pelican they got earlier, and bredren quipped, “What is that, a snack in the basket?” The benchmarks became memes—“Elo 2887” read like the bot just beat your toaster at chess. Some fans love the monster‑long memory and multimodal chops; others say power without tools is pretty talk. Yes, it’s available by API and needs no special hardware—but the community’s verdict is blunt: prove it can act.
Key Points
- •Google released a model card for Gemini 3.1 Pro, a natively multimodal reasoning model in the Gemini 3 series.
- •As of February 2026, Gemini 3.1 Pro is described as Google’s most advanced model for complex tasks, with up to 1M-token input context and 64K-token output.
- •Gemini 3.1 Pro is built on Gemini 3 Pro; details on architecture, data, and implementation are deferred to the Gemini 3 Pro model card.
- •Distribution is via AI Studio, Gemini API, and Vertex AI, governed by relevant terms of service and accompanied by usage instructions and quickstarts.
- •The model was evaluated on reasoning, multimodal, agentic tool use, multilingual, and long-context benchmarks and is reported to significantly outperform Gemini 2.5 Pro; the table includes long-context figures such as 128k average at 84.9% and 1M pointwise at 26.3%.